In The Choosing, Andrea Myers fuses heartwarming anecdotes with rabbinic insights and humor to describe what it means to survive and flourish on your own terms. Portioned around the cycle of the Jewish year, with stories connected to each of the holidays, Myers draws on her unique path to the rabbinate-leaving behind her Christian upbringing,... more...

Menahem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994) was the seventh and seemingly last Rebbe of the Habad-Lubavitch dynasty. Marked by conflicting tendencies, Schneerson was a radical messianic visionary who promoted a conservative political agenda, a reclusive contemplative who built a hasidic sect into an international movement, and a man dedicated to the exposition... more...

This biography of a pioneering Zionist and leader of American Reform Judaism adds significantly to our understanding of American and southern Jewish history.
Max Heller was a man of both passionate conviction and inner contradiction. He sought to be at the center of current affairs, not as a spokesperson of centrist opinion, but as an agitator... more...

Rabbi Menahem Mendl was a Hassidic master renowned for his wisdom throughout Europe. The spiritual leader of the Jews in a small stetl called Kotzk in a corner of Poland, he was nevertheless so famous that he was he was referred to far and wide as the Kotzker. His wise sayings?about human nature, how to live, and the world of the spirit?were repeated... more...

These wide-ranging essays reveal the various roles played by southern rabbis in the struggle for black civil rights since Reconstruction
The study of black-Jewish relations has become a hotbed of controversy, especially with regard to the role played by Jewish leaders during the Civil Rights movement. Did these leaders play a pivotal role, or... more...

The expulsion from Spain did not only result in the destruction and dispersion of Spanish Jewry but led to a crisis in Jewish faith. Don Isaac Abravanel provided a systematic treatment of the main philosophical and theological beliefs of Judaism in an attempt to resolve the inner doubts of his co-religionists. In their Italian exile his son Judah too... more...

Hannah Rochel Verbermacher, a Hasidic holy woman known as the Maiden of Ludmir, was born in early-nineteenth-century Russia and became famous as the only woman in the three-hundred-year history of Hasidism to function as a rebbe?or charismatic leader?in her own right. Nathaniel Deutsch follows the traces left by the Maiden in both history and legend... more...